Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the number of cardiologists.

Responsibility for staffing levels rests with individual National Health Service trusts and their boards who are best placed to decide how many staff they need to provide a given service, taking in to account skill mix and efficiency.

Working with local providers, it is Health Education England’s responsibility to determine the appropriate numbers of students the NHS needs in training on an annual basis. Its latest Workforce Plan for England covering the period 2016/17 is available at the following link:

https://www.hee.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Workforce%20Plan%20for%20England%202016-17.pdf

As at November 2016 there were approximately 1,207 full time equivalent cardiology consultants employed in the NHS.